Abstract
This chapter not only explores but also questions dissent as a paradigm for understanding Cold War poetry. While poets writing during the Cold War had to grapple with polarising oppositions, they also sought alternatives to such binaries as them versus us and communist versus capitalist through which dissent was frequently conceived. Their ‘dissent from dissent’, as Adam Zagajewski put it, produced new forms of poetry, from Allen Ginsberg’s and Dmitri Prigov’s ventriloquising parodies to the search for feminist and postcolonial alternatives to Cold War binaries in the work of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Kamau Brathwaite and Hone Tūwhare. These alternative forms of poetry necessitate an alternative framework for understanding Cold War poetics and its legacy in the poetry of today.